walls bloom with paintings. Colors
riot, soar, and spin. Sculptures
claim the cement floor. Another
world has entered here. Another
world invites you in.

Two imaginations become as one:

John and Dominique de Menil

have found a way to hold the artists'

vision like a mirror up to the gazers'

eyes that they might see, along with

so much else, themselves not as they

were before. The Menil Collection is

born. This is our south, a little exotic,

a little antebellum, eloquent...

An evening at Miss Ima's, where

sunset's glare competes with lighted

candelabra in all eight windows.

Such times gather us, they two

and we two, four to be complete.

Our Huismes, France, sees Dominique

under wisteria's white clusters—not

unlike Miss lma's candelabra.

In New York, we are again four, they

two and we two to be complete,

John telling us about the big business

world he finds himself sharing with

its tough-talking tycoons. "They don't

paint pictures, carve stone. They

don't even put a bicycle wheel on

a pedestal," he assures us. And in Paris,

at l'Orangerie (did it ever grow oranges?)

John and Dominique have masterminded

a Max Ernst exhibition. How to realize

everything is beautiful when you're in it?

Other times, other places. Provence:
The old chateau eyes red-tiled roofs,
along with our hill, olives, lavender.
They two have come for a pair of days.
Here moments of exhilaration
last for hours. We are still miraculously
four complete, as if forever.
Yet again on San Felipe Road,
John, quiet and knowing so privately
that he will leave us all, not to be
four anymore, or even three
for soon, oh, too soon, Max will be
gone, and we are just two to
continue, each in her own domain.